In recent years, the incidence of violence against Chinese doctors has increased dramatically, with the scale, frequency and viciousness of attacks shocking the world. The challenging doctor-patient relationship remains a ...

What is Chinatown? Is it an imaginary construct, a real location, or a community? Is it an ethnic enclave only available to insiders, or a fabricated environment designed specifically for tourists? This thesis attempts to ...

The ubiquity of camera phones, coupled with the increasing mobility of citizens and the rise of digital production as an embedded technosocial practice, is creating incentives for many people around the globe to engage in ...

This thesis explores the evolving nature of independent music practices in the context of offline and online social networks. The pivotal role of social networks in the cultural production of music is first examined by ...

This thesis argues that slapstick is a mode of comedy that has become a tradition because its basic principles of physical violence and disruption, and its conventions of grotesque movement and of mockery and abuse of the ...

The recent increase in digital gaming players and platforms does not imply that digital gaming is as inclusive as it could be. There are still gaps in participation that, if left unaddressed, will exclude groups who have ...

Secrets are a ubiquitous part of contemporary videogame design, yet are largely unexplored within academic discourse and often dismissed as extras. I contend that secrets play a fundamental and influential role within a ...

In today's increasingly digitized, data-driven world, the "old ways" of doing things, especially science, are quickly abandoned in favor of newer, ostensibly better methods. One such discipline is the ancient study of ...

In recent years open data initiatives, which make government data publicly available in a machine-readable format for reuse and redistribution, have proliferated, driven by the launch of open-data government initiatives ...

Over the past several decades, computers have allowed for the increasingly voluminous and rapid ingest of images. These images, made for machine legibility, are called "operational images," a term coined by Harun Farocki. ...

In addition to being a keyfigure in the history of filmmaking, Orson Welles was an original theatre director and radio performer and producer. The aim of this thesis is to study Welles' achievements and failures in theatre, ...

This is the story of an invasive species and one man's quest to eradicate it. The Nile monitor lizard (Varanus niloticus), smaller cousin of the famed Komodo dragon, grows into six feet of carnivorous, ill-tempered muscle. ...

In 2013, the United States Supreme Court heard the case of Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. The case asked one question: are human genes patentable? Gene patents became commonplace during the biotechnology ...

In northwestern Costa Rica, a team of rural workers called parataxonomists has been inventorying butterfly and moth species for 30 years. Just as a paramedic provides a first round of medical care, a parataxonomist does ...

In light of calls that civic participation is declining, efforts are underway to replace outdated, unproductive forms of citizenship. With the majority of Americans now connected to the Internet, community leaders see the ...

Despite an increasingly complex academic discourse, the videogame medium lacks an agreed-upon definition. Its relationship to previous media is somewhat unclear, and the unique attributes of the medium have not yet been ...

The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. ...

The consumption of shark fin soup dates back to the Ming Dynasty in China, when it was served to emperors. Today, the cultural delicacy represents wealth, status, and power. Over the past 30 years, with the rising middle ...